Sermons

Fear, Faith, Dreams and the War

Reading: "Bread and the Newspaper" by Oliver Wendell Holmes

"When any startling piece of war-news comes, it keeps repeating itself in our minds in spite of all we can do. The same trains of thought go tramping round in circle through the brain, like the supernumeraries that make up the grand army of a stage-show. Now, if a thought goes round through the brain a thousand times in a day, it will have worn as deep a track as one which has passed through it once a week for twenty years. …

Blessed are those who can sleep quietly in times like these! Yet, not wholly blessed, either: for what is more painful than the awaking from peaceful unconsciousness to a sense that there is something wrong,-we cannot at first think what,-and then groping our way about through the twilight of our thoughts until we come full upon the misery, which, like some evil bird, seemed to have flown away, but which sits waiting for us on its perch by our pillow in the gray of the morning?

The converse of this is perhaps still more painful. Many have the feeling in their waking hours that the trouble they are aching with is, after all, only a dream,-if they will rub their eyes briskly enough and shake themselves, they will awake out of it, and find all their supposed grief is unreal. …

How this war is simplifying our mode of being! We live on our emotions, as the sick man is said in the common speech to be nourished by his fever. Our ordinary mental food has become distasteful, and what would have been intellectual luxuries at other times, are now absolutely repulsive."

Sermon

Introduction

When I planned for this Sunday's service, I half expected it to be pre-empted by the war. I thought that my chosen sermon topic on the anxiety and stress we were all feeling in the pre-war days could be recast into something workable for this the first Sunday after we went to war in Iraq. I had chosen to steal a sermon title from the televangelist Kenneth Copeland, "No Faith in Fear, No Fear in Love". I actually had no idea what his sermon was about but I loved the title. (This sort of "title borrowing", I have since learned, is not uncommon. In fact, a colleague in Boston took my "Is it Peace or is it Botox?" title for his own just recently. At least I hope it was just the title.

In my planned sermon "No Faith in Fear" I was hoping to work with the relationship of religious faith to our experience of fear in unsettled times and how the despair of feeling powerless can be offset by focusing on our inner strengths to carry us not only through difficult times but into a future that we would hope to have. I haven't discarded that thought entirely and you may find some threads of it woven through my message today. But for the most part, I had to put that topic aside because I do not feel the way I thought I might now that war has begun. Anticipation, it seems, is not the best guide to how one will feel once the event has come.

Disturbing Dreams

I had hoped for some feelings of release, of relief, that a war, the possibility of which had been held over our heads for so many months, and which seemed increasingly inevitable, had finally begun. Instead I got a lot of bad dreams. The last few days since this war has begun I have been repeatedly woken up by disturbing images of suffering, cruelty, devastation. I won't relate any of the details; they are not important. But I do know that I feel as if my psyche has been disrupted by all the evil intentions and inclinations of humanity.

I find myself wondering why I am so affected by this war? I recalled my own thoughts put down in an earlier sermon during the build up to this war. War always entails…

"… great suffering. People are killed. Not only is there death but people, women, children, civilians are maimed and terrorized, infrastructure is destroyed, and environments are laid waste. Disease, suffering, rape and loss of livelihood follow combat like an unavoidable shadow. The setbacks to humanity and any good values of society are always long lasting." (On War, November, 2002)

But the chief evil of war is that it breaks the hearts of those who conduct it. The most impressive argument for avoiding war should be what happens to our own conscience when we enter into it.

Putting aside any justification or even arguments over political necessities, I feel as if the inhumanities of war in my name are being expressed in my dreams in a form of collective guilt. I myself have not gone to war, but a part of me has.

Flight or Flee

And in reaction, part of me simply wants to run away-to forget it all. In the last few days I have had repeated fantasies of just dropping everything and going with my wife and dog to my lake side summer place in Northern Michigan. No television, little human contact-just become a recluse until this is all over. What is odd is not that I find myself pushing away from this war but rather that I have such "escape fantasies" at all. For very rarely, (only in times of incredible stress) do I think in terms of escaping to some far off place. But in conversation with some of you this week I heard similar sentiments (and I ask forgiveness for sharing these comments):

"I wish I could just pack up and go to Canada," one of you remarked.
"I'd like to go and live on an island somewhere," another said.
"I wish I didn't have a T.V.," a friend confessed.

The avoidance of the television is probably more healthy than escapist. It takes great effort not to just flip on CNN "to see what has happened" and thus infect one's mind for another night of disturbed sleep. There are times we need to avoid having that thought go "round through the brain a thousand times in a day" and that is especially true when that thought is of images of war. Our war.

War is hell. That is something on which both hawks and doves agree. What is done will be done in our name and that leaves us all with a rather heavy collective responsibility or collective guilt. But I cannot say for sure that this is the cause of my interior discord. In fact, "guilt" isn't exactly what I have been feeling. I find instead that when I search my soul about this war and my reactions to it, I find contradictions. And with contradictions, stress-a stress that does not easily abate.

I have struggled all along with a certain skepticism about the instigation of this war and the politics of it. And ,despite my realization that diplomacy is the best warfare I find I have also come to believe that there does come a time when taking up arms is necessary. And while I resisted the beating of the war drums all these many months, I am surprised at my own response to it once it has begun. I find myself far more concerned about the lives of our men and women fighting there than all the ups or downsides of foreign policy. These are our neighbors, our sons and daughters, our nieces and nephews, people we know and people who know people we know. As one older UU woman I know asked in consternation, "I was opposed to this war and now my grandson is over there; what can I say now?"

What can we say? Not everyone is completely for or against this war. Many have complex and even incongruous feelings. How do we hold ourselves together as one church with all these contractions, all these feelings so heartfelt and so unresolved?

The Flag

I know some of you have questioned my decision to fly the American flag outside the church this week. I have, as some of you know, mixed feelings about churches flying flags in general. But given that the board gave the responsibility to me to fly which flag when, and given that some of the citizens of our country are doing their duty by risking their lives, it seems to me a very small token of respect to fly the flag for a few days.

Which brings me to another contradiction--one of the more thorny questions for us liberals. Why have we let someone else capture our nation's flag? I grew up proud of the American flag. I began each school day standing before the flag repeating the "Pledge of Allegiance." Everyone did. And yet somewhere in the last few decades we ceded the flag to those with very specific points of view.

After September 11th I put a flag magnet on my car and I was astonished that some of my friends and parishioners expressed discomfort with it. We political and religious liberals, with our roots as deep in the history of this country as any other, have lost our connection with our flag. And at the same time others have picked it up as a standard for their own particular viewpoint. The other day when I was driving home I came to a stop light and there were about two dozen people gathered. Flags were everywhere. And there in the midst of it all, underneath a large banner of red, white and blue, was a sign that read (and I could hardly believe it) "America, Love It or Leave It."

Well, I love this country.

And I support our troops.

And I am very, very unhappy about this war!

Are these contradictions or does all this just come with the territory of these turbulent times? One begins to worry about that "too-horrible-to-accept-proposal" made by Hobbes that war was the natural state kept uneasily at bay by civilization. At times the discomfort seems too much to bear. As Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the essay I quoted this morning,

"How this war is simplifying our mode of being! We live on our emotions, as the sick man is said in the common speech to be nourished by his fever. Our ordinary mental food has become distasteful, and what would have been intellectual luxuries at other times, are now absolutely repulsive."

So what is a soul to do with all this contention?

During this last week we kept the sanctuary open for those who wished to come and meditate or pray or just to sit and collect themselves around the event of our nation going to war. Not many came by, but I think it's a good practice to have the church open for those who feel the need to visit that space "set aside" as sacred in our community.

At one point, one of our lay ministers and I were here in this room, alternately sitting in silence and conversing about the state of the world. This sanctuary is quite a space when you take the time to take it in. In the distance you can hear the cars go by but in the foreground you can hear the clock tick-tock with its old movements. I realized as I sat here that this sanctuary has seen an awful lot of ups and downs in this nation's history. It was built before anyone even knew this country would have a Civil War. This very room remained a place of worship and prayer through the two World Wars and the Great Depression, through the Korean and Vietnam Wars. In fact, for a great many generations this space has preserved and witnessed innumerable sadnesses and countless joys. And today it is here for us, just as faithfully as it was for those whose lives and loves, sorrows and joys have long past from this earth. It stands as a testament to liberal religious faith in this town and in this nation.

It is, like a prayer in itself. One only has to sit here in for a short while when no service is filling it with "today" to realize the depth and breadth of human experience this room knows. It tells us that many, like us, have survived dark nights of the soul and come through to the break of day. It reminds us that we have here, within this living religious body, an example of spiritual persistence of the sort that will lead us through these difficult days. Call it faith, call it what we all know to be goodness in the world, call it the thread of all Unitarian and Universalist history here, but it is undeniable and carries forward "through the ages" in an unbroken line.

Yesterday at the church leadership retreat I did a short homily as part of opening worship. In it I related a line from what some consider the oldest written work, the Chinese Book of Changes also known as the I Ching. The I Ching is a commentary on 64 Hexagrams. The first of these relates to a primal power that both creates and destroys. It emphasizes that a dynamic of unwearied persisting is the way to handle this creative and destructive power. Ancient commentary compared this perseverance to the tenaciousness and continuousness of the heavens. One line reads. "Use the best of yourself to overcome negative circumstances."

Thomas Cleary, renowned for his translation of the "Art of War," gave an interpretation of those lines that has helped me through the past few day of war. His interpretation is this:

"When you are beset by frustrating problems, it is important to avoid letting them have a decisive influence on your mood, because the frame of mind thus created will tend to beckon its own kind in the form of further frustrations and problems. You will have a better chance of surviving well under negative conditions, and even of ultimately thriving, if you are able to reach into your inner reserves and draw forth your most positive qualities. If you can discover hidden strength untouched by external influences, by nurturing and fostering that strength you may overcome conditions that would otherwise thwart you and inhibit you from fulfillment."
(The Human Element, p.109)

This is a wise and comforting sentiment. Let us, then, take time to consider our own faithfulness to what we believe to be goodness in the universe and reflect upon that here in this ancient and sacred space. May we discover all our inner reserves to carry us through these turbulent times. My we find peace here. Peace at heart and perhaps some wisdom that will guide us into a future less fearful than today. A future in which we can all sleep soundly and safely.

Let me close with these words of Oliver Wendell Holmes:

"Whatever miseries this war brings upon us, it is making us wiser, and, we trust, better. Wiser, for we are learning our weakness, our narrowness, our selfishness, our ignorance, in lessons of sorrow and shame. Better, because all that is noble in men and women is demanded by the time, and our people are rising to the standard the time calls for."

Benediction

Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. (John 14: 27).

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